William Morris: Life and Times (1984)

From the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

William Morris did not become a committed socialist until the age of fifty, but the early years of his life involved him in a range of experiences which contributed to making his last 13 years a solid commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism.

Born in 1834 into a family whose father had become wealthy through some copper mining shares, Morris never had to suffer the type of deprivation that 19th century capitalism thrust on the mass of the population. Nevertheless, at an early age he avoided the smug complacency that the landed and industrial capitalists of mid-Victorian England overwhelmingly adopted. While most of the wealthy ignored the squalor brought about by the development of capitalist industry the young Morris became involved with the critics and opponents of the existing society.

At Exeter College, Oxford, where Morris went in the early 1850s he met a group from Birmingham, most of whom—like Edward Burne-Jones—were to be lifelong friends and some of whom—like Charles Faulkner—were to be associated with his later socialist activity. The early aim of this group was to set up a religious brotherhood and they sought to enlist Morris in their “crusade and holy warfare against the age”. Morris soon rejected the religious aspect of this movement. But for many opponents of mid-19th century capitalist society, religion provided a standpoint from which to make critical attacks. Similarly, others looked back to mediaeval society as a basis for criticising the horrors of 19th century capitalism. For writers like Thomas Carlyle the mediaeval church had provided a social bond that had disintegrated with the development of money and market relations. Morris was influenced by some of these ideas although he rejected Carlyle’s solution of creating some type of feudal bond between the aristocracy and the wage worker. Perhaps more influential on Morris at this time was John Ruskin, whose work On The Nature of Gothic, although based on an idealistic view of the mediaeval craftsmen, did express the idea that pleasurable labour was the only foundation on which any real art could flourish. Morris was later to develop this theme in a form central to his arguments for socialism.

Morris was acutely aware of the large scale sufferings at this time and was especially horrified at the reports of human degradation brought about by the Crimean War, but he felt he could not “. . . enter into politico-social subjects with any interest, for on the whole I see that things are in a muddle, and I have no power or vocation to set them right in ever so little a degree”. Such a feeling of powerlessness reflected the weakness of all opposition political movements in the 1850s and the near absence of organised protest in the years after the last great Chartist demonstration of 1848. It also reflected the power of the landed and industrial capitalists in mid-Victorian England.

In 1855, while on a trip to France, Morris decided to dedicate himself to art. He was already writing poetry and continued to do so throughout his life. He then looked to architecture, joining the architect G .S. Street in Oxford, and although he stayed only nine months this had an important influence on him. Street encouraged all his workers to practice a wide range of crafts and Morris, although at the time he had difficulty in applying himself to much of the work, took up many different crafts. He joined a group called the pre-Raphaelites—a group of painters who regarded all art since the Renaissance as in decay, and who also adopted a mediaeval standpoint in their criticism of their society. They blamed the growth of industrial production (or materialism, as they called it) rather than the system of capitalism.

Morris took up painting but, as he had limited abilities, he switched to trying other crafts. He worked at stone carving, stained glass, illustrated manuscripts (on which he became an authority), as well as embroidery for wall hangings. He also designed furniture and, of all things, mediaeval armour. When he decided to marry in 1859 he gained the co-operation of a life long friend and future associate of his socialist activity, Philip Webb, in the design and building of his own house. The variety of craftwork involved led Morris and a number of friends into the foundation of a firm to enable them to spread what Morris hoped would be a revival of art in useful products. At the basis of the project was the belief in the dignity of work, of human labour, and the pleasure that could be derived from producing useful things. The “Firm” ventured into other crafts such as wallpapers and later produced textiles, carpets, tapestries and dyed and printed cotton, and eventually books at the Kelmscott Press. But it was always struggling to remain a viable enterprise.

Morris’s venture into learning and practising this wide range of crafts had been partly inspired by a mediaeval outlook and the realities of running a business based on quality of workmanship under capitalist conditions were constantly to confront him. To get away from the financial problems plaguing the firm he would often withdraw into writing poetry. Consequently much of his poems are escapist in tone and it is not surprising that his most well known poem of the time, The Earthly Paradise, gained its influence precisely because it deliberately sought to evade current problems. In ruling class circles Morris gained the reputation of being a safe, romantic sentimentalist of no real threat to capitalist values and that reputation tended to stay with him even after he became a socialist.

In 1868 Morris began studying and translating Icelandic Sagas and in 1871 he visited Iceland. In the Sagas he saw the vision of a classless tribal society based on kinship social relations—in stark contrast to the world of the alienated worker producing goods for the market and the commercial priorities of British capitalism. The experience of Iceland broadened his ideas on the history of human society and he found it “. . . a good corrective to the maundering side of mediaevalism”. He learned of a pre-capitalist society that was not mediaeval and that “the most grinding poverty is a trifling evil compared with the inequality of classes”.

Soon after Morris’ Icelandic trips and in the same year that he published his own version of an Icelandic Saga (1876) he became involved in direct political activity. In that year he became treasurer of the Eastern Question Association, supporting Gladstone and the Liberals against the Tory government’s policy of support for Turkey in a war with Russia. Morris’s concern had arisen because of his horror at this backing of a state whose rulers had only recently been exposed for atrocities in Bulgaria. He also feared that the war would spread jingoism. But the prime concern of both Disraeli, the Prime Minister, and Gladstone was not with human suffering. Their main interest was to keep Russia away from the Dardanelles and beyond that the Suez Canal and the trade routes to India.

If Morris was still at this time somewhat naive about politics he learned quickly. He addressed his 1877 pamphlet on the war between Russia and Turkey not to the politicians but to “the working-men of England” and named one of the causes of the war as the “gamblers on the Stock Exchange”.

Morris quickly saw that the Liberals were just another Party supporting capitalism and instead he turned to studying socialism. His initial ideas came from Ruskin, J .S. Mill and Fourier, but on joining the Social Democratic Federation in 1883 Morris set about reading Marx. Capital did much to clarify his thinking and provided the foundation for his work and commitment during the remainder of his life. Marx’s materialistic conception of history provided an explanation for Morris’s own experiences of Icelandic, mediaeval and modern capitalist societies. It also made clear what Morris had believed and expressed himself in a lecture on the Lesser Arts given in 1878—that history had meaning in the sense that it held for the future the possibility of a classless society where a popular art could flourish on the basis of pleasurable work. Morris clearly understood that this change in society could only be brought about with a change in the consciousness of the majority of people. “Practical socialism”, as he called revolutionary socialism, was a question of “making socialists” and therefore it was necessary to “educate the people in the principles of socialism”.

Morris remained committed to this view in the years that followed despite the differences that arose within the various organisations advocating socialism. The Social Democratic Federation split in 1884 because Hyndman was an opportunist politician who sought to gain support by advocating reforms and was willing to form alliances with other political parties for that purpose. He also supported nationalism, especially when jingoism could gain popular appeal. Morris despised this opportunism and along with others, such as Marx’s daughter Eleanor, left the SDF and formed the Socialist League.

Morris’s propaganda work for the League dominated his life for the next few years. He gave lectures up and down the country, edited and wrote numerous articles for the League’s paper Commonweal and came up against the law on a number of occasions during his outdoor propaganda activities. In the later 1880s the development of the New Unionism drew a larger number of workers into the unions. It enabled politicians to foist themselves on the backs of the working class by offering palliatives to workers to gain votes (without having to change existing attitudes or propagate socialism). Morris opposed this reformist trend.

When some members of the Socialist League called for participation in parliamentary elections Morris, although not opposed to using Parliament as such, believed that concentrating on these elections would have directed the League away from the essential task of “making socialists” and instead into advocating reforms. The differences led to the Parliamentarists breaking away, leaving Morris and his associates at the mercy of anarchists, who soon dominated the League. When this happened Morris and his socialist friends withdrew to form the Hammersmith Socialist Society.

In the last years of his life Morris sought to bring about some unity among the various people and organisations calling themselves socialists. Although he never abandoned his belief in the necessity of “making socialists” he recognised that the expected growth of support for a socialist revolution was not to take place in his own lifetime. In one of his later writings, News From Nowhere, he portrays the socialist objective of a stateless, moneyless, classless society, and also predicts a long period of struggle with a series of diversions before the working class would consciously decide to bring about socialism.

MD

News in Review: Syngman Rhee (1960)

The News in Review column from the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Syngman Rhee

In 1950 the U.S.A. intervened in Korea, when that country was torn by internal strife and faced with the threat that Communist China was attempting to take over the country. Fortunately for the U.S.A., Russia had just walked out of the Security Council, and the United States was able to get the United Nations' support against “Communist aggression" and go to the aid of Korea in order to save that country for “democracy.” Most nations of the Western bloc will not forget in a hurry places like Pusan and Seoul, where bitter fighting took place. Many died on both sides for that hackneyed phrase “ Freedom.” 

It has been asserted more than once that the so-called Chinese Communism is a repressive dictatorship where people have no rights and democratic government is not known—in fact it is a police state. The war, as we know, ended in a stalemate in 1953 with North Korea in the orbit of China and the Southern part under the “democracy” of Syngman Rhee. Following the recent shooting of demonstrators in Seoul. Mr. Christian Herter, the U.S. Secretary of State summoned Mr. Yen Chan Yeng, South Korea's Ambassador to the U.S.A. for discussion. Within an hour, the Secretary's Press Officer was “expressing the U.S.A.’s profound and growing concern over (1) the high-handed suppression of political opposition by Korea's 85 year old President Syngman Rhee; (2) brutal Korean police action against student protest marchers and (3) other repressive measures unsuited to a free democracy.” It seems that Syngman Rhee has all the aspirations and undemocratic desires of a minor Stalin. Unfortunately, the workers who died in defence of “Freedom” in Korea cannot protest, but we can. This is another of the many tragic examples of workers being hoodwinked with empty phrases. Wars are fought to perpetuate this vicious capitalist system, not to institute “democratic freedoms.”

Caryl Chessman

The recent legal, ritual putting to death of Caryl Chessman in San Quentin gas chamber, after twelve years' occupation of a death cell, brings into morbid focus the irrational and negative character of the death penalty. Those who defend the death penalty act on the base assumption that human nature is essentially anti-social and that only “the fear of the rope” deters us from asserting our “instincts” to wantonly murder and rape. On the contrary, it was our own society, which institutes at every level of social life struggle and competition, that nurtured the violence in Caryl Chessman's make-up during his earlier years. Twelve years ago, Chessman was a hardened criminal, a product of slum poverty, brutalised by a childhood history of reformatory schools. His own criminality was in itself a negative response to the injustices of his own environment. Yet by Chessman's own efforts through education, the man they executed was a thousand cultural miles removed from the man they originally condemned. But blind retribution had to proceed. For an individual to offend against morals by committing rape, as Chessman was convicted of having done, poses a social problem. But when organised society in all its brutal ignorance exacts primitive vengeance from the life of an individual after twelve years' incarceration, that constitutes a nightmare. The significance of the case of Caryl Chessman will be missed if we fail to condemn the society which first produced him and then so brutally destroyed him.

That Wedding

Princess Margaret's wedding has been a source of joy to the headline writers of the popular press for some months now. Sickening discussions have taken place on the number of bridesmaids, the style of the wedding dress, and so on. More recently, sections of the press have been coming down to earth with some articles on the cost of the whole pantomime. The Government, without batting an eyelid, has spent £25,000 on the wedding, with a further £40,000 on the honeymoon cruise. It is surprising that these papers, and some Labour M.P.'s. should suddenly criticise the expenditure on the cruise, because, as pointed out in the House of Commons, the royal yacht costs £4,000 a week in wages alone, whether or not it is in use. However, those in Parliament who do criticise, are in the minority; the majority think that as advertising agents for British capitalism, the royal family do a good job of work, and they should be paid accordingly, with now and then a bonus like this gigantic wedding.

Economic Rebore

Our economic system is a gigantic machine that needs constant care and attention. A mechanic who understands his car can keep it in good order indefinitely, but the political mechanics, whose job it is to keep capitalism in good running order, have very limited control over the caprices of our mode of production. However, one body of opinion insists that a healthy balance between production and consumption can be maintained, if, from time to time, the brakes are applied to working class spending. Production is geared to meet the demands of the market at their peak, and any fall in demand can cause chaos in the economy. The latest credit squeeze was designed to restrict the too rampant expansion of industry by putting a curb on capital investment. This old machine, even if it gets a de-carb and a rebore, is liable to break down at any time. We all have to travel in it, and it is time we thought seriously about getting ourselves a new one.

Policeman's Lot

The increasing rate of crime and the shortage of manpower in the police force has caused the Government to set up a Royal Commission to investigate the matter. A joint memorandum has been submitted to the Commission by the Police Federations of England and Wales and Scotland. The memorandum said “That the decline in the relative status and pay of the police constable was calamitous—that police pay should be maintained at between 40 and 45 per cent. above the average weekly earnings of manual workers." It was claimed in the memorandum that "the constable at the maximum of his scale is no longer 55 to 60 per cent. ahead of the average worker’s earnings. He has fallen so far that he is getting less pay than the average.” This situation led one Chief Constable into allowing his men to take up civilian work after finishing their duty, a state of affairs that is deplored in the memorandum, it being considered that “a constable should be paid sufficient to be able to hold himself aloof from spare time work which might lead to embarrassment or to a conflict of loyalties.”

This fall in pay is an example of the natural oscillation of price around value, caused by fluctuation of supply and demand on the market. The fact is that the post-war boom having created a terrific demand for productive labour power, the police force has been to some extent neglected in the mad scramble for profit. We use the term ”natural oscillation of price” because this applies to all commodities which are helpless to resist the effect of these oscillations. The unique commodity in this respect is labour power, whose owners can resist market fluctuations to some extent by intelligent use of their trade unions and the strike weapon. The police don’t have access to this weapon and are thus as helpless as a pot of- jam in determining its price.

Red Herrings

The second United Nations law of the sea conference — on the Icelandic fishing dispute — has ended in failure. Mr. John Hare, leader of the British delegation, blamed the "selfish interest" of the other contending capitalist countries. No capitalist class will ever admit that its own interests are selfish: the selfish ones are always the others. Our rulers will expect the working class to support them on this as on many other issues. But the disputes over three, six or twelve mile limit does not consume the working class. The only limits which concerns the workers is the budget between them two classes in society — the rulers on one side and the ruled on the other.

Plane Over Russia

The incident of the American plane which was shot down over Russia when on a spying mission raised a furore. There was much criticism of the American action, especially in left-wing circles. It is hard to see why this was. The present division of the world into mutually contending powers — which is inevitable so long as there is capitalism — means that each country must spy on all the others in order not to be taken at a disadvantage if war breaks out. It all goes back to the basic contradiction in all non-Socialist "progressive” thinking: the system of capitalism is supported. and yet its results are attacked.

Material World: Pirate Nations – The Jolly Roger (2016)

The Material World Column from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We’ve had enough!’ The Pirate Party have captured the imagination of many in Iceland, especially the young. Iceland’s political landscape has been transformed by its general election result and the success of the Pirate Party which won 10 seats in the 63-seat parliament – up from the three it won in the 2013 general election, in a voter turn-out of 79.2 percent.  For the Icelandic establishment, they may still retain control of the helm but their ship of state is beginning to flounder.

The Pirate Party does not have a leader, although former Wikileaks activist and founding MP Birgitta Jonsdóttir tends to speak for it in public (perhaps, as a poet, she has a better way with words). She said her party subscribes to its agenda of ‘fundamental system change’.

They are challenging the assumption that political leaders are necessary and politics could not operate without them.

Ásta Guthrún Helgadóttir, another of their parliamentary members explained, ‘We are not here to gain power. We are here to distribute power.’

The Pirates’ core issues appeal to the popular sentiment in Iceland; direct democracy; freedom of expression; civil rights; and government transparency as set out in a crowd-sourced constitution which creates new rules for civic governance.

Political parties under the Pirate flag are now active in many countries. But we should remember that their libertarian attitudes were based on the history of real and sometimes not so real pirate ‘nations’. In the modern era, we have had Somalia which was notorious for its piracy, while one of the earliest foreign interventions of the newly-independent United States was the suppression of the Barbary pirates operating from North Africa. Our conception of piracy stems from the adventurers of those state-sponsored buccaneers and privateers from the time of Raleigh and Drake when the Caribbean was a melting pot of poor immigrants, political exiles and escaped plantation slaves.

Christopher Hill in Radical Pirates? described life at sea as based upon mutual aid, a much necessary survival tactic in which piracy was no exception in fostering a natural solidarity. Many pirates had crewed on merchant ships and grown to dislike the hierarchal authoritarianism.

Booty was divided up by a fairly egalitarian share system and those maimed received extra compensation. The Dutch Governor of Mauritius met a pirate crew and commented: ‘Every man had as much say as the captain’. The captain enjoyed no special privileges. Pirate captains were elected and could be deposed at any time for abuse of their authority; for cowardice or cruelty towards the crew and revealingly, for refusing ‘to take and plunder English Vessels’ for the pirates had turned their backs on the state and its laws and no lingering feelings of patriotism were to be allowed. The captain only had right of command in battle, otherwise, all decisions were made by the whole ship’s company.

Libertalia (or Libertatia) was a more-than-likely fictionalised colony founded in the late 17th century in Madagascar by pirates. Marcus Rediker, in Villains of All Nations, writes of Libertalia, ‘ [The] pirates were anti-capitalist, opposed to the dispossession that necessarily accompanied the historic ascent of wage labor and capitalism. They insisted that ‘every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired.’ They resented the ‘encroachments’ by which ‘Villains’ and ‘unmerciful Creditors’ grew ‘immensely rich’ as others became ‘wretchedly miserable.” They spoke of the ‘Natural right’ to ‘a Share of the Earth as is necessary for our Support.’ They saw piracy as a war of self-preservation. [They redefined the] fundamental relations of property and power. They had no need for money ‘where every Thing was in common, and no Hedge bounded any particular Man’s Property,’ and they decreed that ‘the Treasure and Cattle they were Masters of should be equally divided.’

Of course, the Pirate Party of Iceland will be unable to manage things much better than the conventional parties since it is capitalism, not the politicians, which runs its government and which is to blame for all our problems. They will have the doomed future of the original anarchistic pirates they wish to emulate, which they will soon discover if they ever do form a government.

ALJO

Karl Marx and Iceland (1975)

From the December 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to radio and press reports, a remarkable development has occurred in Scandinavia. Hot water from the springs in Iceland is being shipped to Sweden and used to heat buildings and wash up in Sweden.

The water is drawn off at around boiling point and can be maintained at about 70 degrees Centigrade in insulated ships. What a splendid application of the Marxian labour theory of value. Like virgin land or wild fruit, hot water in Iceland has no exchange-value until human labour is applied to it. It is like the Sahara, valueless until then: when it becomes a commodity, with a price, its value determined by the amount of socially necessary labour-time required to deliver it to the consumers.

Pathfinders: Whale Flukes (2018)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

When people ask questions that begin ‘What would socialism do about . . . ?’ we have to be careful how to answer because a) it would be presumptuous of us to make tomorrow’s decisions today on behalf of everyone, b) prevailing circumstances and technology may change unpredictably and c), as a Party wag once put it, socialists don’t have crystal balls.

But you don’t need technical knowledge, or crystal balls, to realise what socialism would most likely do in many cases. Sometimes common sense is enough. But capitalism is far too perverse to be so amenable, as two recent news items illustrate.

The first item is the story that Japan is trying to get its supporters on the International Whaling Commission (mostly small countries with juicy Japanese aid programmes) to vote to lift the long-standing global embargo (‘Japan says it’s time to allow sustainable whaling’, BBC Online, 7 September). The whaling question is bizarre from almost every angle. Japan argues that now that the minke whale population has returned to sustainable levels, the embargo makes no sense. But Japan has famously been hunting minke whales in defiance of the embargo ever since it was established in 1986, with the risible pretence of ‘scientific research’. This oddity seems to be what has drawn so much media attention onto Japan, while to virtual media indifference and without any such ‘scientific’ pretence, Norway and Iceland together hunt even more whales per year than Japan, including the endangered fin whale. Their reason? The IWC embargo was only ever voluntary and so they have both opted to ignore it. One wonders why the Japanese don’t simply do the same.

After all, they would have a point. The IWC was deliberately crowded out by non-whaling countries (over 70) to permanently out-vote the whalers, so the debate was harpooned from the start. The Japanese are also surely correct in pointing out that most opposing countries support large-scale meat farming, often in cramped and inhumane conditions, and are thus being completely hypocritical. Certainly whales are intelligent animals, but then so are pigs. Moreover it’s a strange kind of moral argument to say that we shouldn’t kill things because they are intelligent, when capitalism regularly kills intelligent humans by the tens of millions, by neglect if not active warfare.

But what’s really odd about the whaling industry is that it doesn’t even make money. Whaling in all three countries is heavily subsidised by their governments. Though populations have been gulled into supporting whaling as a mark of nationalist pride, hardly any of them eat whale meat. In Iceland, whale watching is a far more lucrative industry and almost the only people who eat the meat are tourists who think of it as a cultural box to tick (‘Icelanders Don’t Like Whale Meat—So Why the Hunts?’news.nationalgeographic.com, 27 January 2016).

In Norway fewer than 5 percent eat whale steak (Wikipedia). The rest is sold for dog food or shipped to Japan. Even in Japan there is hardly any taste for it, and the market is on the point of collapse. The reason in all cases is the same: whale meat just doesn’t taste very good. Despite its claims to centuries of tradition, Japan only started large-scale whaling after World War 2 when it was unable to afford lamb and beef imports.

Norway’s only remaining whaling company actively propagandises the industry by visiting schools and sponsoring apprenticeship schemes. Iceland echoes a Life of Brian parody by demanding the right to eat whale as a symbol of national independence even though none of them do, while Japanese ‘scientific’ whale meat usually ends up in restaurants served to tourists.

Meanwhile government subsidies keep the leaky ship afloat. The more you look at the industry, the madder it gets, and it serves as an example to anyone tempted to argue that capitalism’s market system is always supremely logical and economically rational. It sometimes isn’t, even in its own terms.

To answer the question ‘Would there be whaling in socialism?’ you only have to ask yourself if you would be prepared to go out on a factory ship and kill whales with grenade harpoons for the sake of something that nobody wants to eat in the first place.

The Green And Pleasant Sahara

The other story is more encouraging, with the suggestion by researchers that planting up to 9m square kilometres of solar panels and wind turbines across the Sahara desert would have the effect of greening it (‘Large-scale wind and solar power ‘could green the Sahara’’, BBC Online, 7 September). It turns out that both solar and wind collection systems have the by-product of increasing local precipitation, quite apart from the energy they produce. The effect on local people could hardly be more positive, in turning arid desert into a Garden of Eden, so unless further climate modelling produces the unhappy report that more rain on terrain A means less rain on terrain B and that such a project would wreck the global climate even more than it’s currently being wrecked, there appears to be no down side. It’s estimated that such a project could generate up to four times the entire world’s annual energy consumption. In a socialist society looking for safe and sustainable ways to produce abundant energy, this could well be the decisive factor in proceeding with such a scheme in all haste.

But in capitalism there is the unpredictable market to take into account. What rich country or corporation is going to front up the money for this, and toward what perceived profit? Local people in the Sahara may well benefit but as they are among the poorest people on Earth they don’t count, economically speaking. What does count is the sale of the energy to other countries, but energy prices can be severely affected by many factors, especially oversupply. Investors are not likely to invest in any system that supplies energy over and above projected demand, because this will lead to lower prices and a loss of profit. So, good as the idea looks, if the numbers don’t add up capitalism won’t build it.

Or maybe they will, if they apply the farcical logic of the whaling industry. No wonder socialists think capitalism is bonkers.

Paddy Shannon

The Panama Papers: All in it Together (2016)

From the May 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is an expensive business. In any society where the population is divided between those few who own but do no productive work, on the one hand, and the many who have to work but own little, on the other, it is obviously necessary to build up a powerful and far-reaching state apparatus to protect the owning few. Each country’s owning class has to safeguard itself both internally and externally. Internally, it must construct and maintain police forces (overt and undercover), courts, prosecuting machinery, prisons and so forth, in case the propertyless many should rise against them, and attempt to construct a different society – or even just to try and replace the present leaders. Externally, it must construct and maintain armies, navies, air-forces and so on in order to prevent any other country’s capitalist class trying to seize part of its property, and also to support any attempt it may make to seize territory at present held by another country’s owning class.

All this costs money, a great deal of money. Britain is building a new super-prison in Wrexham, with places for 2000 inmates, at a cost of £250 million. And that’s just building it. Apparently it costs about £40,000 a year to keep each prisoner in jail - or £65,000 a year if you include the costs of the police, courts etc. But these expenses, enormous as they are, are dwarfed by the amount a capitalist class will pay out to defend its property from possible attack by foreigners (or possibly to acquire more property from foreigners). The United States is planning to procure a new generation of bombing planes (to destroy the buildings of hostile countries and kill their citizens); there are 175 of them, the total cost being estimated at between $40 and $50 billion. (That’s somewhere between twenty-eight thousand million pounds, and thirty-five thousand million pounds – which comes to about £100 for every man woman and child in the United States.)

So where will the money come from? The answer becomes more obvious the more you think about it. If you want food, you have to go and get it (and pay for it) at a place where they have food, e.g. a supermarket. If you want clothes, you go to a place where they sell clothes. And if you want money, you have to get it from the people who have money. There’s no point in demanding significant contributions from all those people who have to work for a living. When the economists examine the finances of people with low and middle incomes, they always say it’s a matter of swings and roundabouts. Taxation is demanded from many such people, and many others get various kinds of benefits. At the end of the day, it’s merely redistributing the income within that (very large) group of people. Apart from all that, of course, if the working class as a whole did have to pay serious taxes, it would mean much greater pressure for higher pay to make up for it, and in the end the capitalists as a whole would be taking with one hand and having to give back with the other.

All this being so, the money to run the state and preserve it from dangers both internal and external has to come from the capitalists themselves. But while all ruling authorities acknowledge this, and have strict laws in place in order to collect sufficient money from the rich to operate the state machine, the individual capitalists will often be tempted to reduce as much as they can their own personal tax burden. And this is where ‘offshore’ companies and similar dodges come in. Recently many documents – emails, correspondence etc – have been leaked from an influential law firm, Mossack Fonseca, in Panama. The firm has apparently acted for many wealthy people round the world who wished to conceal money or property from the authorities in their own countries. The leaked data from this single firm make it clear that the further up the power scale a wealthy person is in their particular country, the more they will be tempted to fiddle their tax affairs in such a way that they end up paying very little or sometimes nothing: like a member of a tug-of-war team who cheers on the others but personally does very little tugging.

One way to make your affairs ‘tax-efficient’ as the lawyers say (i.e. putting your money where it is safely out of sight of the local tax-collectors) is to establish a company or trust in one of several countries round the world that advertise themselves as ‘tax-havens’. Money gained illegally can also be stashed away quietly, since criminals often find it difficult to explain how without any very obvious sources of income, they are suddenly in possession of a lot of cash (a Rolls-Royce parked outside a terraced downmarket house would cause inconvenient curiosity). Through these secretive companies it’s possible to ‘launder’ money, for example when offshore companies (with anonymous owners) buy houses in London’s booming property market. ‘World leaders, criminals and billionaire sheikhs have secretly poured hundreds of millions of pounds into London properties, leaked offshore data reveals. The cache of documents from a Panamanian law firm confirms the capital as the go-to place for wealthy foreigners and criminals anxious to protect their anonymity and assets’ (Times, 6 April).

Capitalism is fundamentally the same throughout the world, but local history and local conditions often mean that the local version looks different on the surface. Different politicians have different names for their own version of capitalism – some try to get votes by calling it socialism, some even have the nerve to call it communism – but in fact it is recognisably the same the world over. And being the same, the local politicians share the same desires: how to hide their own wealth, while at the same time getting the rest of the country’s rich people to hand over enough of the readies to enable the country’s capitalist system to survive and prosper. Here are a few of those listed by theTimes or the BBC as being connected with these offshore subterfuges, who appeared in the Panama papers – either their own names came up, or the names of family members or close friends:

·        Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, Iceland’s prime minister (in fact there are links in the data to twelve present or former heads of state or prime ministers); poor old Sigmundur had to resign.

·        David Cameron, Britain’s premier, who is going to host an anti-corruption summit in London  shortly; there were also calls for his resignation.

·        Gianni Infantino, the new head of FIFA (just installed to ‘clean up the mess’, because of the  peculiar financial transactions of the last lot).

·        Gonzalo Delaveau, head of the Chilean branch of the anti-corruption watchdog, ‘Transparency  International’.

·        James Ibori, ‘the corrupt Nigerian governor who is known to have bought property across London’.

·        Leyla and Arzua Aliyeva, who ‘are said to have amassed vast business empires’ since daddy –  President Aliyev of Azerbaijan – came to power in 2003.

·        President Macri of Argentina.

·        Two close associates of Marine Le Pen, head of France’s National Front.

·        A close associate of President Pena Nieto of Mexico.

·        Alaa Mubarak, son of the former Egyptian dictator.

·        Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates.

·        Mariam Safdar, the daughter of Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister of Pakistan (and two sisters of hers).

·        Kojo Annan, son of the former head of the U.N.

·        Kalpana Rawal, Deputy Chief Justice of Kenya’s Supreme Court.

·        Ayad Allawi, former Prime Minister of Iraq.

·        Dr Saraki, President of the Nigerian Senate.

·        Rami Makhlouf, cousin and close associate of President Assad of Syria.

·        Li Xiaolin, daughter of the former Prime Minister of China.

·        Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine.

·        Kim Chol Sam, a senior official of the North Korean regime.

·        Close associates of Vladimir Putin.

·        Brother-in-law of Xi Jinping, president of China.

Plus lots of others: e.g. Hans-Joachim Kohlsdorf, former senior executive of Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, Michael Geoghegan the former HSBC boss, David Hunt, ‘one of Britain’s most feared gangsters’ according to the Times, Dominic Chappell, now principal owner of British Home Stores, Tarek Obaid, the founder of Anglo-Saudi oil company Petro-Saudi (and a ‘leading investor’ in a company running a dozen academy-type schools). And, of course, Mossack Fonseca, with 300,000 clients, is only one firm among dozens in the business of helping people to hide away their assets. It will be seen that there are people here from all sides of the various hostile groupings and power blocs into which capitalist countries naturally cluster themselves. They may denounce each other ferociously, but they are all alike when it comes to seeing if they can avoid paying their fair share of the enormous costs of running capitalist countries. The laws operating in each country are very often different, but even so it is quite possible that none of those named broke any laws: it was merely a question of being able to enjoy wealth but not pay taxes on it.

David Cameron appeared on the list because his father, Ian, had operated two offshore trusts, one in the British Virgin Islands, one in Jersey. In 2012 he criticised Jimmy Carr, comedian, who had joined an offshore tax-avoidance scheme: he said it was ‘morally wrong’. When asked about Gary Barlow, a pop star, who had campaigned alongside Cameron for the Conservatives in the 2010 election, and who had joined a similar scheme, he said he hadn’t had time to look into yet; though he had found sufficient time to give Barlow an OBE in 2012. So it’s a little embarrassing that Cameron and his wife bought shares in his father’s off-shore fund in 1997 for £13,500, and sold them thirteen years later for £31,500, two-and-a-half times as much – a very acceptable profit made through offshore trading. Not to mention that Cameron’s education (Eton, fees now £32,000 a year, and Oxford, where Cameron joined the Bullingdon Club – dress-suit to wear at club dinners: £3,500) was presumably paid for by his father’s offshore activities.

So it seems that’s how ‘morally wrong’ can be financially right.

Alwyn Edgar

Socialism Means: We are Opposed to War (1973)

From the July 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the two world wars the Socialist Party of Great Britain alone took the position of opposing them because, as our 1914 Manifesto stated, “no issue was involved which justified the shedding of a drop of working-class blood”. Members of other organizations refused to fight for religious, humanitarian and political reasons; none shared our stand based solely on working-class interests.

“Join the professionals" is the punch line of the advertisements which try to sell us the advantages of life in the modern Army. For once we have no argument with the ad-men; war is no longer a matter for part-timers. It is a socially organized, socially pervasive act planned, organized and carried out by highly trained people.

All over the world, states reserve a large — in many cases the largest — part of their budget to their armed forces. This means that a large part of the knowledge, the skills and the material resources of those states is diverted into organizing and producing a powerful machinery of destruction.

The more “advanced" countries vie with each other in turning out the weapons with the fastest, most obliterative effect; some of the results of this contest have an awesomeness which would once have seemed appropriate only to the wildest nightmares of science fiction. But this is reality — nuclear weapons and methods of biological warfare, to name only two which we know of, are there — waiting.

If they are ever let go a large part of the settled world would quickly be wiped out. This very fact has been in part responsible for something of a change in the style of warfare. How long ago was it, that hostilities opened only after a declaration of war? Did America and China ever admit that they were at war in Vietnam?

Nowadays the great nation states and power blocs of capitalism are in perpetual manoeuvre for advantage against each other, pushing out in a series of minor conflicts (if Vietnam can be called minor) with their ultimate threat held in reserve.

The spectacle of modern society, with all its capacity to provide abundance for its peoples, wasting valuable resources in this way while it still has problems of famine and poverty, has provoked a great many theories about the cause of war. "Human nature" is one of them — war is simply an extension of an individual’s irritability. Munitions manufacture is another — men like Krupp have a vested interest in the continuing use of weapons. Sometimes the explanations have a tenuous connection with the truth — for example Lord Boothby writing in The Times (20 May 1968) " . . . they (the Central Bankers) were primarily responsible for the Second World War.”

In fact none of these explanations comes near the root of the matter. This can be done only by examining war as an aspect — along with human behaviour, munitions firms, bankers — of capitalist society.

Capitalism is a social system with the characteristic that its wealth is produced primarily for sale. But selling, as any supermarket bears witness, is a matter of competition. If we expand the point, we can see capitalism is a system which divides the world into a number of competing units; on one scale these might be supermarkets competing for customers in the High Street, on another they are states and alliances which clash over exploiting markets or getting access to things like oil.

A state is a coercive machine which enforces the interests of a particular group of capitalists, a particular group of the ruling class. Wherever these capitalists have interests, their state machine will protect them and if possible expand them.

Since capitalism is an international system, most states have interests outside their own frontiers. Lonrho, for example, has large investments in Africa; the oil companies have the same in areas like the Middle East, the Far East, the North Sea.

Provided all goes well the customary exploitative operations of capitalism can be carried on with no more disturbance than need be caused by the expected double-dealing of commerce, banking and so on. It is when the competition gets too fierce — when a new ruling class in Africa threatens to take over foreign investments, when the Icelandic fishing interests grab a bit more of the seas, if the carve-up of the North Sea (which was an example of original robbery) were to be upset by some latecoming state — that force is brought to bear.

Then the armed forces — the Professionals — take over the argument from the businessmen and the diplomats. This is war. The tragedy is that the people who are most directly involved in the hostilities, and who pay the price in terms of suffering, have nothing to gain or lose in the struggle. In the dispute over the Icelandic fishing grounds it is the owners of the trawler fleets and the food combines on both sides who stand to gain, not the fishermen or the sailors in the gunboats. These men have no ownership in any of the means of wealth production, including the seas, yet they are the ones who suffer through the cod war and some of whom may sometime be killed in it.

In larger wars millions of workers die or bear an untold burden and at the end of it all their basic situation remains the same as before. None of their problems has been lessened, let alone solved. They are still exploited and degraded in service to the ruling class and to the demands of capitalism. They still suffer poverty and a host of related social malaises.

The wars of capitalism solve no problem simply because they aim only to readjust the balance between clashing interests. To abolish war we must go for its roots, not tinker with the superficialities of those interests. We must strike at the basis of capitalism. But to do that means to abolish the system and to replace it with Socialism, a world order in which all human interests are in harmony and the conflicts of capitalism a black memory.

Ivan

Editorial: Voting Against Austerity (2012)

Editorial from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The people of Iceland did it first. Twice. In two referendums they rejected a deal their government had negotiated with international creditors. They even put a former prime minister on trial. It didn’t make any difference. Now they have been followed by voters in France and, more dramatically, in Greece. It won’t make any difference there either. Because, in capitalism in a slump, there is no alternative to falling living standards for the majority.

Nobody wants their standard of living to be reduced, whether as cuts to their wages or their pensions or as the reduced income unemployment brings. But that’s what they get, even though they might vote against it. It’s understandable that, given the chance in an election, people should vote to reject austerity. At least it shows they are not prepared to accept things lying down. For the people of Greece to have voted back those promising yet more austerity would have been to brand themselves as gutless.

To imagine that electing another set of politicians is going to make any difference, though, is an illusion. It assumes that governments control the way the capitalist economy works whereas in fact they have to govern on its terms of ‘no profit, no production’. They have to give priority to profits and profit-making. In a slump that means imposing austerity.

Henry Ford is reputed to have said that you can have a car of any colour so long as it’s black. Capitalism in a crisis is like that. You can elect any government, but that government will impose austerity. Even if Greece defaults and withdraws from the euro, the cruel fact is that any government, even one elected on an anti-austerity basis, would have to do this.

The fuel that drives capitalism is profits. A slump means that capitalist businesses are investing less than before because it’s not so profitable. The only way capitalism can get out of this is if profitability revives. This happens spontaneously in a slump. The assets of failing and bankrupt firms pass cheaply to others, who can therefore use them more profitably. Interest rates fall, allowing firms that borrow money to invest to keep a larger proportion of their profits. Increased unemployment exerts a downward pressure on wages, increasing the share of profits in new production.

Left-wingers and trade union leaders think that the way out of a slump is to increase spending. Get the government to spend more, they say, and that will get production going again. But it won’t. For the simple reason that the increased wages or government spending would have to be at the expense of profits; which would make things worse. Some governments may start off trying to do this but they are very quickly obliged by the economic laws of capitalism to effect a U-turn and impose austerity.

That’s the way capitalism works, and it’s the only way it can work. Capitalism is a system that puts profits before people and cannot be reformed to do otherwise. The only way forward is not to vote for a change of government policy or to reform some aspect of capitalism, but to act to replace capitalism with socialism so that the Earth’s resources really can become the common heritage of all and used to serve human welfare.